


Ain't no sunshine / when she's gone

by Irrelevancy



Category: One Piece
Genre: Akuma no Mi | Devil Fruit, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Introspection, Koala deals with the consequences of the job, Moral Dilemmas, Revolutionary Army - Freeform, Robin gets it, Utilitarian Ethics as Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-02-19 13:02:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22111291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Irrelevancy/pseuds/Irrelevancy
Summary: Morning glories, according to The Old Farmer's Almanac, symbolize affection.Or; Koala doesn't regret it.
Relationships: Koala & Nico Robin, Koala & Sabo (One Piece)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 21





	Ain't no sunshine / when she's gone

**Author's Note:**

> Writing gen?? In _my_ kink? Is more likely than you think!

The touch of tin against the back of Koala's neck was cold, and the drip of condensation down the back of her collar made her jump.

"Wha—Robin-san!"

She pouted, because that was a thing she could do now. With people who cared for her well-being, Koala could put on an expression that professed a desire that was true to her— _don't be mean to me_ —in an expectant fashion, and get what she wanted.

...Well, kind of. Robin just grinned with a melodic little hum, and handed Koala one of the two tin cups she held in her hands. When Koala brought the cup up to sniff (something, again, doable only in trusted company, because cups like this blocked off her line of vision and she'd never see an attack coming from below), there was a familiar tickling sensation on her shoulder and the scent of zinnia.

She glanced over, just in time to more-or-less run her cheek into the second cup of cold mead.

" _Robin-san."_

She was laughing. It was the exact same laugh she had when the local stray cats brought dead prey to gift at her feet, and she scritched their ears and called them cute.

"Sorry, sorry," Robin lied, but Koala wasn't the type to be very bothered by lies at all. "I just wanted to cheer you up a bit."

"Cheer me—" Koala blinked, and the arm disappeared off her shoulder with another flourish of petals. The second tin was safely back in Robin's two main hands, but she didn't drink from it. _Not yet_ , Koala absently reminded herself. _It's not likely to be poisoned._

She was really trying at the whole well-we-can't-afford-to-be-paranoid-everywhere-can-we thing. And she thought she was actually doing pretty well. Better than Sabo, at any rate.

But Robin had implied something that probably needed clarification.

"I don't need cheering up," she clarified. Then, just to be _very_ clear, "I'm not sad or anything."

"That's terrific," Robin said like a genuine compliment. Koala was just about to relax and turn back to her view of the barren boulderlands again, when Robin continued, "so if you're not sad or anything, what's troubling you?"

 _Trouble_. That was different than sadness. Koala didn't deal too often in sadness, but she was an old hand at trouble. She knew all the species, genera, families of it. She hadn't even suspected that perhaps, that little crowded feeling in her chest that propelled her out of the dinner party and out to the cliffside tonight, might be any version of it.

But now, with Robin's prompting, she cast her sights inwards. Trouble, huh?

"I was thinking," Koala found herself saying. It happened like this, sometimes, when the self that spoke and the self that watched became unsynchronized, and Koala had to decide which one she would rather commit to. Which one was _safer_ for her to commit to. There was no danger here, she told herself, surrounded by surfaces and the second most paranoid woman she knew, who could make fists and teeth bloom everywhere like flowers.

"I was thinking about what I did, on that island."

"I heard," Robin replied delicately. Everything she did felt delicate, in the way that the sound of bones slipping from cartilage was delicate. "Everyone's singing your praises for it inside."

That was, after all, what the little party was about. The RA didn't really go in for rambunctious celebrations of their achievements, because time and resources were always better spent on more work than patting themselves on the back. But for the sake of morale though, they _sometimes_ broke out the mead, the military tin cups. They sometimes took a spare hour to tally up the victories.

(It was unspoken agreement to forget about the losses, just for that single hour.)

A whole hour, Koala thought, dedicated to what she did on Kiss Island. It was far too much wasted resources. That, and two cups of cool mead. Robin surely deserved hers. Koala, on the other hand.

There was a curious pressure on her hand. Koala looked down to find one of Robin's hands sprouting from her lap, pushing up the far side of her cup so the drink didn't topple over in her slack grip. Instead of righting it herself, Koala just handed the cup over, and watched as Robin's hands, their gestures considering, conveyored the untouched drink back inside.

"Why are you thinking about it?" Robin asked, amidst this entire operation, because a woman who could make thousands of limbs bloom at once was a master of multitasking. Koala found her hypnotizing—quite literally, because Sabo had once shown Koala that little hypnosis trick with the _focus here_ and the _most relaxed you've ever been._ It was so easy to _focus_ on Robin, because every direction Koala looked in, there was the potential of her tan arms, the arch of her ankles.

"What did you hear?" Koala countered, because she was distracted, and she defaulted to defensive when she was distracted.

"An expert play," was Robin's answer. That, unlike before, didn't sound like a compliment. "Three parties, and you played them with aplomb."

"I don't regret it," Koala instinctively snapped, startling herself. That was an emotion far too externalized. Nico Robin, she reminded herself, was an expert in espionage as well. Robin may not mean to, but people like them breathed every breath with the intention of retrieving intel. Conscious or not, it wasn't something they could turn off, and Robin now smiled ruefully at her for it.

"I don't think you should," was the cheerless agreement.

 _No regrets_. That was the running joke between her and Sabo for some time now. This had been a solo mission; Koala wondered if it would've been easier, had Sabo been with her. Had he not gone off on another chaos-reigning, fire-billowing situation, she wondered if she'd be watching dirt and stone alone.

(She _didn't_ wonder whether her and Sabo together would've done things differently, because she knew the answer to that already. She just wondered if the burden would be easier to bear, with her partner since childhood.)

It would be so easy to turn her back now, and dismiss Robin. It would be so easy to make it clear she just wanted to be alone. But that wasn't true, she realized. She didn't want to be alone. She wanted—

"It wasn't even difficult," Koala muttered, kicking her feet where they dangled off the roof edge. She could feel the rough finish of the architectural stone beneath her thighs, and didn’t get more comfortable. "The moment the treaty was scrapped, I just—I just went for it."

It: blood. The throat. The prize. Was it really so terrible, if what she had her eyes on the whole time was the well-being of an entire city of people?

"It went well," Robin reminded her.

"It could've gone worse," Koala reminded _her_.

It: the inauguration of a criminal into high public esteem. The unsigned treaty—and, more accurately, the soulless rhetoric around the royal debate of it—had put Koala into such a rage that all the bloody dots, in the compartment of her mind where she visualized such things, just _linked_ , so clearly, with dripping red strings.

Step One: break knees until she got an introduction to the local kingpin of the seedy underground crime rings. Make sure she had proof of his crimes well-stocked. Introduce herself, with her courtliest smile, as a valet of the Lord of Kiss, with an offer of marriage for him and the Lord's daughter.

Step Two: twist wrists until she got an introduction to the Lord of Kiss, who had turned away tens of thousands of refugees by turning away that treaty. Put on her slickest smile, and introduce herself as a secretary from the Bank, with an offer of marriage from the Vice President of the Bank for the Lord's daughter.

Step Three: restrict carotids until she got an introduction to the President of the Bank, who funded the entire lobby against signing the treaty. (Saving all those refugees, the President had said, would be an improper allocation of funds entrusted to them by the people of Kiss. _For the people_. How dare he presume to know what's good for them, how dare he pretend to speak for them.) Introduce herself as the lady-in-waiting of the Lord of Kiss's daughter, with a request of employment for her Lady's husband, and of course a handsome payout.

Step Four: compile proof of crimes and nepotism both—some real, some attributable only to a ghostly valet/secretary/lady-in-waiting—to expose to the public. Incite the rage of the people against their high-echelon society, and watch the Lord scramble to manage PR by signing a treaty that would save tens of thousands of refugees.

( _For the people_. How dare she—?)

"To do bad things for what you think is a good cause," Robin said, her tone heavy with the weight of an eight-figure bounty on an eight-year-old. Koala was so damn _grateful_ she called it a bad thing. "Feels awful sometimes. I know."

"I don't," Koala said again, this time with exhaustion that nearly trembled her voice, "regret it."

Blooming, blooming. Robin was leaning back on both her hands, but her tin cup was nowhere to be seen. In the compartment of Koala's mind that stored encyclopedia pages on everything in the world, she remembered that zinnias, on a great number of islands, symbolized _thoughts of absent friends_. Robin's fruit produced bodies and petals both, and Koala wondered if Robin had bloomed different flowers before the Incident on Sabaody, before the RA found her.

The mead had gone warm in the balmy night, and there was no cool condensation to make Koala jump this time, when Robin's third arm pressed the second tin cup to her cheek once more.

"So here's," she said, voice a steady melody, like a spirit-raising song, the Light of the Revolution, "to no regrets."

Staring at Robin, Koala tilted her head, until Robin smiled with her eyes and, with the arm bloomed on Koala's shoulder, tipped the cup against Koala's lips.

Then, once Koala's swallowed her mouthful of mead, Robin tiled the cup the other way. Drank her own mouthful.

"Cheers, hm?" Koala found herself able to genuinely laugh, after all. Her line of sight was no longer full of lifeless boulders, but hypnotizing blooms. She didn't know if this was the most relaxed she's ever been, but the likelihood wasn't small.

It was hard to tell, but the next little splash of petals into the air seemed more like sunflowers than zinnias. Koala didn't need encyclopedias to tell her what happiness looked like, on the second most paranoid woman she knew, in the middle of the night at the base of the Most Wanted Army in the World.

"Cheers," Robin said, her eyes fluttering closed as hundreds more of her pupils bloomed around them, blue like morning glories. Koala closed her eyes too, and let Robin take the watch. "To both of us, hm?"

**Author's Note:**

> So I was reading [What Money Can't Buy](http://digamo.free.fr/sandel12.pdf) by Michael Sandel and... thought of this? I don't?? Know?? The three-way con was from an old joke about henry kissinger or something (sorry, I know), repurposed.
> 
> My [Tumblr](https://touchmycoat.tumblr.com/), drop a comment!


End file.
